David Wengrow joined
UCL in 2004 having been Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford and
Frankfort Fellow at the Warburg Institute. His books include The Archaeology of Early Egypt and What Makes Civilisation? He recently
gave the Rostovtzeff Lectures at New York University, and is shortly to give
the Haecker Lectures at Heidelberg. His current fieldwork is in Iraqi
Kurdistan, investigating the prehistoric transition from village to urban life.

Title: An Archaeology of
Political Life, from the Bronze Age to the Kurdish Spring

Relationships between
states and state-less societies have been a feature of human history for five
thousand years. But our understanding of those relationships has often been
distorted by inappropriate comparisons between ancient and modern situations,
and by the legacy of outdated evolutionary concepts. My lecture will advance an
alternative view of human political development, rooted in the evidence of the
archaeological record, and will explore its implications for contemporary
state-making projects in the Middle East.